Lust Thrust Thursdays: Imagining an Ancient Party

Luxorius’ Epigram #77, written in Roman North Africa in the sixth century A.D. – just as the dark ages were gathering – has had a tough time of it.

Along with most of his other ninety-odd poems, it languished in monkish archives, labeled and forgotten until only a single manuscript containing his collected poems remained. That manuscript didn’t surface until the 1600s and Luxorius has since been more the object of obscure scholarship than a vital poet. A pinned butterfly. A curiosity preserved under the glass of a dead language.

In many cases, including epigram #77, the curious find themselves smirking at what classicist scholars oftentimes dismiss as crude ancient pornography. Poems best kept in Latin. Poetry, that – except for our occasional cultural jailbreaks – would never be allowed in mainstream anthologies.

And when you stumble upon some of these poems and read the learned commentary, you have to ask whether the classicists who act as our docents are any more sympathetic to what might be going on in the poem than a Victorian or Eisenhower era editor might be.

It was the question Yeats asked in his poem, The Scholars:

Bald heads forgetful of their sins,Old, learned, respectable bald headsEdit and annotate the linesThat young men, tossing on their beds,

Rhymed out in love’s despairTo flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.

All shuffle there; all cough in ink …

Did their Catullus walk that way?

With Luxorius, the situation is compounded by the titles affixed by the respectable, tonsured heads of their day – medieval copyists. For these clerics, the old world had changed, mankind was saved. One didn’t throw antiquity and one’s ancestors away, but these were artifacts of a bankrupt age, as irrelevant as childhood souveniers. Most simply needed to be labeled and stored.

And so, in some monastery library, Epigram #77 acquired a title. No need to actually read the poem, the label is enough to warn you that it’s trivial and – by the way – filthy.

Morris Rosenblum, Luxorius’ only comprehensive modern English commentator, provided a prose translation in 1960 as follows:

Because you drink wine and discharge all of it from your loins, your upper region should have been your thigh.You will drink holding your wine in (you will be able to do this, Follonia), if you should grossly imbibe with your lower part.

A reasonable first reaction is probably not much different than that of the monks – why bother to translate this childish bathroom joke? A 12 year old could do better. But then, you have to ask – is this really what Luxorius was saying? He did write some other fairly sophisticated poems. And look at the structure with the rhythms and the backward dancing, echoing internal touch-rhyme schemes.

It took some bother to write these four lines. And while prose can sometimes rise to poetry, poetry refuses to make sense in prose. Maybe – with a little imagination – there’s something more subtle worth translating here.

There are a couple of choices that guide where this poem might go in translation. The first is how to treat “Bacchum” and “Baccho.” Whatever else is murky, I don’t think the poem is a religious invocation of the ancient god of wine. Society was largely Christian and the secondary meaning of “wine” and “partying” rather than “the divine Bacchus” is what should apply. There is, of course, a holy-drinker, sacred-weekend aspect to the use of the term – but we’ve lost the sacrosanct connotation that invoking the wine-god’s name would have had. One choice would be to not invoke Bacchus directly, but to look for his wild abandon elsewhere in the poem.

Another key word is the adjective “horridius”: –which Rosenblum converts to an adverb – in the last line. Rosenblum translates this as “grossly” – but I think horridius (or the adverb horride) can be one of those false friends. The Oxford Latin Dictionary has seven variants in meaning and most of them are closer to wild, rough and disheveled than “horrid.” In this poem, I think it might be stretched to convey both an element of crudity and an element of emotional wilderness – raw, messy nature. And, in modifying drinking and thirst, an element that might be used to invoke Bacchus in English without quite using his name.

II: So let’s imagine a party.

A gathering, perhaps, at one of those lost seaside villas. The company is mellow. The wine is good, perhaps too good. A man and woman – maybe they’ve just met, maybe they’ve known each other casually but, somehow, now find themselves connecting. In any case, they’re a bit tipsy and both know it.

He suggests a stroll through the garden, maybe out to the beach. The weather’s perfect, the evening clear, just growing dark and starry. Somewhere, along their uncertain path, she smiles and giggles. Would he mind waiting, while she slips behind this rock or that bush to pee?

Is Follonia just drunk, or is there an element of flirtation, maybe seduction? Are both of them drinking and flirting with that sacred weekend where everything’s permitted and every little naughtiness smiles with seduction?

And perhaps, later that night, or another night remembering their first night, they might find a silly poem in their banter. (And if you’re going to translate it into English some fiteen hundred years later, why not take a clue from the monks and give it a lead in title line,)

A smooth marble Cyprian returns to blushand reveal her truth through a breathlessbody. She pours her own special heatinto every part of the statue untilit comes alive with flowers.No need to lie about where.A violet doorway whose delicay’sguarded by a swell of handmaiden roses.

A certain person lay down to dinner with and ended up fucking boiling Marina.Now the adultery is making some salty waves. Not only should this affair not becondemned. If possible, it should, in fact, be commemorated.Because it reminds us that Venus, the daughter of the sea, somehow, still lives.

Art Beck’s Luxorius Opera Omnia, or a Duet for Sitar and Trombone (Otis College /Seismicity Editions) won the 2013 Northern Calofornia Book Award for poetry in translation. A further sampling of Luxorius epigrams with some background on this long neglected and obscure Roman poet can be found here.

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Sounds like fetishizing violence. I think what concerns me about that is not the lust for violence, which is the reading I had and I totally understand that impulse, but that the impulse to violence is concealed beneath mythology/ideology.

Sounds exactly like my day , but entirely different . I think I just missed the "malted"s era , but you seem to be there . Did the kindly girl wear a poodle skirt , perhaps ? And that bit about saving the napkin : thought I was the only one who stooped to such things ; but then , any port in a storm of snotty cayenne , I suppose .

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